the Duquesne Spy Ring consisted of 33 Nazi spies (one pictured) arrested by the FBI in 1941 and sentenced to serve a total of over 300 years in prison in what is the largest spy ring conviction in the history of the United States?

To rescue Germany from the socio-economic chaos established by the world-wide Great Depression, Nazism promoted a politico-economic “Third Way”; a managed economy, neither capitalist nor communist.[14][15] The far-right character of Nazism was established with the purging of the anti-capitalist Black Front and Strasserism, leftist Nazi sub-groups motivated by nationalist rancour towards Germany’s conditions under the Treaty of Versailles, and a perceived internal Judæo–Bolshevist conspiracy that abetted military defeat. The defeat-induced social, political, cultural and economic ills of Weimar democracy proved critical to the ideologic consolidation of Nazism, and its successful electoral challenges to the Weimar Constitution of the Deutsches Reich, which allowed the Nazi Party to legally assume power of German government in 1933.

Post-World War II Nazism (neo-Nazism) has adherents in several countries around the world, although it remains a fringe movement. The ideology, iconography, and literature of Nazism are now outlawed in Germany and some other European countries. Due to Nazism’s racism and antisemitism, the term Nazi and affiliated ideas and symbols (e.g. the Swastika, SS runes, SS uniforms) denote and connote white supremacist racism in Europe and North America.

Etymology

The term Nazi derives from the first two syllables of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party).[16] Members of the Nazi Party identified themselves as Nationalsozialisten (National Socialists), rarely as Nazis. The German term Nazi parallels the analogous political term Sozi, an abbreviation for a member of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany).[17][18] In 1933, when Adolf Hitler assumed power of the German government, usage of the term Nazi diminished in Germany, although Austrian anti-Nazis used it as an insult.[18]

The racist subject of National Socialism is Das Volk, the German people living under continual cultural attack by Judeo-Bolshevism, who must unite under Nazi Party leadership, and, per the spartan nationalist tenets of Nazism: be stoic, self-disciplined and self-sacrificing until victory.[19] Adolf Hitler’s political biography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle) formulates the Weltanshauung of Nazism with the ideologic trinity of: history as a struggle for world supremacy among the human races, conquered only by a master race, the Herrenvolk; the decisive, autocraticFührerprinzip (leader principle); and anti-Semitism as universal source of socio-cultural and economic discord.

The Jewish–Bolshevism conspiracy theory derives from anti-Semitism and anti-communism; Adolf Hitler first developed his worldview from living and observing Viennese life from 1907 to 1913, concluding that the Austro–Hungarian Empire comprised racial, religious, and cultural hierarchies; per his interpretations, atop were the “Aryans”, the ultimate, white master race, whilst Jews and Gypsies were at bottom.[19]

Intellectually, Hitler little considered and questioned the empire of which he was a citizen; moreover, disliking its multi-cultural society, he concluded that ethnic and linguistic diversity had weakened the Austro–Hungarian Empire, thus the contemporary political dissent. He disliked democracy because it allowed political power to ethnic minorities and to liberal political parties, who “weakened and destabilized” the empire with internal division. Hitler’s cultural, historical, and political beliefs were tempered in combat during World War I; by Germany’s loss of the war, and by the Bolsheviks’ successful October Revolution of 1917 that installed Marxist communism in Russia. In the 1920–23 quadrennium, Hitler formulated his ideology, then published it in 1925–26, as Mein Kampf , a two-volume, biography and political letter-of-intent.[20]

The original National Socialists, the 1919 German Workers’ Party (DAP) said there would be no program binding upon them, thus rejecting any Weltanshauung. Nonetheless, when Hitler assumed command of its successor, the Nazi Party, the politico-ideologic substance of Nazism concorded with his political beliefs — man and idea as political entity, the Führer.

The Italian fascists proposed a corporatist "organic state" that required uniting the classes of society, like a fasces. Moreover, because fascism exalted the state and the nation, Italian fascist ideology lacked racial theories and official racism. German Nazism, however, over-emphasized the Aryan raceHerrenvolk concept until reducing the German state to mere means to an ideologic end. Furthermore, blond-blue-eyed-Aryanism was unpopluar with Italians, who are not such a volk; nonetheless, the Italian Fascist government exercised a variety of nationalist racism and genocide in its concentration camps, antedating Nazi Germany.[23]

Ultra-nationalism

Nazi Germany was ideologically based upon the racially-definedDeutsche Volk (German People), which denied the limitations of nationalism.[25] The Nazi Party and the German people were consolidated in the Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community), a late-nineteenth-century neologism defining the citizens’ communal duty is to the Reich, rather than to civil society, the citizen-nation basis of Nazism; the socialism would be realized via common duty to the volk, by service to the Third Reich in establishing Großdeutschland, the embodying locus of the peoples’ will. Hence, Nazism encouraged ultra-nationalism, to establish a world-dominating, Aryan Volksgemeinschaft. The précis of this central tenet of Mein Kampf is the motto Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Empire, One Leader).

Militarism

Nazi militarism was based upon the belief that great nations grow from military power, and maintain order in the world. The Nazi Party exploited irredentist and revanchist sentiments, and cultural aversions to aspects of Modernism, (despite the Reich embracing modernism by their admiration for engine power), thus conflating nationalism and militarism into the ultra-nationalism necessary to establishing Großdeutschland.

Early Nazi rhetoric included anti-capitalism, especially anti-finance capitalism; [15] in attacking the ills of Weimar democracy, Adolf Hitler identified the “pluto-democracy” Jewish conspiracy that favoured liberal, democratic parties, in order to maintain the integrity of capitalism.[27] Furthermore, ideologically orthodox leftist Nazis attacked the corporation as the leading instrument of finance capitalism’s oppression of the worker (later, they were purged from the party); nonetheless, throughout his politcal campaigning, Hitler emphasized the background role of Jewish financiers in the ills of Weimar democracy.[28] In 1920, the Nazi Party published the National Socialist Program, an ideology that in 25 points demanded:

that the State shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens . . . the abolition of all incomes unearned by work . . . the ruthless confiscation of all war profits ... the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations ... profit-sharing in large enterprises ... extensive development of insurance for old-age ... land reform suitable to our national requirements.[29]

Despite such demands, during the 1920s, Nazi Party officials variously attempted either to change or to replace the National Socialist Program. In 1924, the Party economist theoretician Gottfried Feder proposed a new, 39-point program, retaining some old and introducing some new ideas.[30] Hitler did not directly mention the program in Mein Kampf; he only mentioned "the so-called programme of the movement".[31] In 1927, expounding the Nazi Party’s socialism, Hitler said: "We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak; with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property, instead of responsibility and performance”.[32]

Yet two years later, in 1929, Hitler corrected himself, saying that socialism was “an unfortunate word altogether” to have used; dissembling, he said: “if people have something to eat, and their pleasures, then they have their socialism”. Historian Henry A. Turner reports Hitler’s regret at having integrated the word socialism to the Nazi Party name.[33] In 1930, Hitler further disambiguated the socialist misnomer matter, saying: “Our adopted term ‘Socialist’ has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not”.[34] In 1931, during a confidential interview, to influential editor Richard Breiting, of the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, a pro-business newspaper, Hitler said:

I want everyone to keep what he has earned, subject to the principle that the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State ... The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners.[35]

In 1932, Nazi Party spokesman Joseph Goebbels said that the Nazi Party was a “workers’ party”, “on the side of labour, and against finance”.[36]

The Nazi Party’s early self-description as “socialist”, caused conservative opponents, such as the Industrial Employers Association, to describe it as “totalitarian, terrorist, conspiratorial, and socialist”.[37]

Working class and middle class appeal

In 1922, to ensure German public perception of the Nazi Party as politically unique, Adolf Hitler discredited other nationalist and racialist political parties as disconnected from the mass populace, especially lower- and working-class young people:

The racialists were not capable of drawing the practical conclusions from correct theoretical judgements, especially in the Jewish Question. In this way, the German racialist movement developed a similar pattern to that of the 1880s and 1890s. As in those days, its leadership gradually fell into the hands of highly honourable, but fantastically naïve men of learning, professors, district counsellors, schoolmasters, and lawyers — in short a bourgeois, idealistic, and refined class. It lacked the warm breath of the nation’s youthful vigour.[38]

Despite many working-class supporters and members, the appeal of the Nazi Party to the working class was neither true nor effective, because its politics mostly appealed to the middle-class, as a stabilizing, pro-business political party, not a revolutionary workers’ party.[39][39] Moreover, the financial collapse of the white collar middle-class of the 1920s figures much in their strong support of Nazism, thus the great percentage of declared middle-class support for the Nazis.[39] In the poor country that was the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s, the Nazi Party realised their socialist policies with food and shelter for the unemployed and the homeless — later recruited to the Brownshirt Sturmabteilung (SA — Storm Detachment).[39]

Their ideas were synthesized by the Reichstag Secretary, Alfred Rosenberg, in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, a pseudoscientific treatise proposing that: “[F]rom a northern centre of creation which, without postulating an actual submerged Atlantic continent, we may call Atlantis, swarms of warriors once fanned out, in obedience to the ever-renewed and incarnate Nordic longing for distance to conquer and space to shape”.[40] According to Terrence Ball and Richard Bellamy, The Myth of the Twentieth Century is the second-most important book to Nazism, after Mein Kampf.[41]

In establishing Nazi German racial superiority, Adolf Hitler defined “the Nation” as the highest creation of a race, and that that great nations were the creations of homogeneous populations of great races working together. These nations developed cultures that naturally grew from races with “natural good health, and aggressive, intelligent, courageous traits”. Whereas the weakest nations were those of “impure” or “mongrel races”, because they were disunited. Hitler claimed that lowest races were the parasitic Untermenschen (subhumans), principally the Jews, who were living lebensunwertes Leben (“life-unworthy life”) owing to racial inferiority, and their wandering, nationless invasions of greater nations, such as Germany — thus, either permitting or encouraging national plurality is an obvious mistake.

During World War II, when faced with occupying too much territory with too-few German soldiers, Nazism expanded the Master Race definition to include Dutch and Scandinavian men as superior, German-stock Herrenvolk, in order to recruit them into the Schutzstaffel (SS); few joined.

Nazi eugenics: “We Do Not Stand Alone” (1936).

Hitler argued that nations who could not defend their territories did not deserve a country. He said that “slave races”, such as the Slavic peoples, had less of a right to life than did the master races — especially concerning Lebensraum. He claimed that the Herrenvolk had the right to vanquish inferior indigenous races from their countries.[42]

In Germany, the master-race populace was realised by purifying the Deutsche Volk via [[ (see: eugenics; the culmination was involuntary euthanasia of disabled people, and the compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded. The ideologic justification was Adolf Hitler’s consideration of Sparta(11th c.–195 BC) as the original Völkisch state; he praised their dispassionate destruction of congenitally-deformed infants in maintaining racial purity: [43][44] "Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent, and, in truth, a thousand times more humane, than the wretched insanity of our day, which preserves the most pathological subject."

Nazi cultural perception of the Jews, based upon the anti-SemiticThe Protocols of the Elders of Zion, emphasized that Jews throve on fomenting division among Germans, and among nation-states. Yet Nazi anti-Semitism was also physical and racial. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels said: “The Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race ... As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation’s goods.”[36]

Anti-homosexuality

In late February 1933, as the moderating influence of Ernst Röhm diminished, the Nazi Party purged the homophile clubs where gay, lesbian, and bisexual Berliners congregated, then outlawed academic and pornographic sexual publications, and organized homosexual societies, forcing the emigration of the likes of the actress and writer Erika Mann, and the novelist Richard Plaut. In March 1933, Kurt Hiller, the organizer of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sex Research), was imprisoned to a concentration camp; the Nazi régime incarcerated some 100,000 homosexuals during the 1930s.[45]

On 6 May 1933, Hitler Youth of the Deutsche Studentenschaft attack on the Institute of Sex Research, and later publicly incinerated its library and archives, in the streets of the Opernplatz, destroying some 20,000 books and journals, and some 5,000 images. The Hitler Youth also seized the Institute’s rosters of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender patients. During the book-burnings, Joseph Goebbels formally addressed a crowd of some 40,000 people.

Initially, Hitler had protected Röhm from Nazis who considered his homosexuality a violation of the Party’s anti-homosexual policy; when Röhm proved a politically-viable challenger to his leadership of the Nazi Party, Hitler betrayed him. Hence, in 1934, with the Night of the Long Knives (30 June–2 July), Hitler assassinated every feasible Nazi political opponent; Ernst Röhm’s killing was justified because he was homosexual, and to suppress moral outrage in the Brownshirt Sturmabteilung (SA) ranks.

Schutzstaffel (SS) Chief Heinrich Himmler, also an initial supporter of Röhm, defended him against charges of homosexuality, arguing they were the fabrications of a Jewish character-assassination conspiracy. After the Night of the Long Knives purge, Hitler promoted Himmler, who then zealously suppressed homosexuality, explaining that: “We must exterminate these people root and branch . . . the homosexual must be eliminated.”[46] In 1936, Himmler established the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion; homosexuality was officially declared contrary to “wholesome popular sentiment”, identifying gay men as “defilers of German blood”; as concentration camp prisoners, they wore a pink triangle idenfying them as such.[47][48]

Church and state

Hitler extended his rationalizations into a religious doctrine supported by his criticism of traditional Roman Catholicism. In particular, and closely related to Positive Christianity, he objected to Catholicism because it was not the religion of an exclusive race and its culture. Simultaneously, the Nazis integrated to Nazism the community elements of Lutheranism, from its organicpagan past. Hitlerian theology integrated militarism by proposing that his was a true, master-religion, because it would create mastery by avoiding comforting lies. About religions that preached love, tolerance, and equality “in contravention to the facts”, Hitler said they were false, slave religions, and that the man who recognized said “truths” was a “natural leader”, whilst deniers were “natural slaves”; hence, slaves, especially the intelligent, continually hindered their masters with false religions.

Although the “National Socialist leaders and dogmas were basically, uncompromisingly antireligious”, Nazi Germany usually did not directly attack the Churches, the exceptions being clerics who refused accommodation with the Nazi régime. Martin Bormann, a prominent Nazi official, said: "Priests will be paid by us and, as a result, they will preach what we want. If we find a priest acting otherwise, short work is to be made of him. The task of the priest consists in keeping the Poles quiet, stupid, and dull-witted."[49][50] To demoralize Poland, the Nazis killed almost 16 per cent of the Polish Catholic clergy; 13 of 38 Bishops were sent to concentration camps.[51][52] These actions, and the closing of churches, seminaries and other religious insitutions, almost succeeded in exterminating the Polish clergy.[53]

In pro-Nazi countries, fascist anti-clericalism was unofficial, and was usually manifested in the arrests of select clergy via false charges of immorality, [54][55] and secret harassment by Gestapo and SD agents provocateur. A notable case was that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran Pastor and theologian who fought Nazism in the German Resistance.[56][57] Nonetheless, the Nazis often used the Church to justify their politics, by using Christian symbols as Reich symbols, and, in other cases, replacing Christian symbols with Reich symbols, Nazism thus conflated Church and State as an ultra-nationalist political entity — the Nazi Germany embodied in the motto Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (“One People, One Empire, One Leader”).[58][59]

Julius Streicher

Several of the founders and leaders of the Nazi Party were members of the Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society), who romanticized Aryan race superstitions with ritual and theology.[60] Originally, derived from the Germanenorden, the Thule Society shared the racist superstitions of Ariosophy that were common to such pan-German groups; Rudolf von Sebottendorf, and a man named Wilde, lectured the Thule Society on occultism.[61] Generally, the society’s lectures and excursions comprised anti-Semitism and Germanic antiquity, yet it is historically notable for having fought as a paramilitary militia against the Bavarian Soviet Republic.[62]Dietrich Eckart, an associate of the Thule Society, coached Adolf Hitler as a public speaker, and Hitler later dedicated Mein Kampf to Eckart.[63] The DAP was initially supported by the Thule Society — but Hitler quickly excluded them in favour of a mass movement political party, by denigrating their superstitious approach to politics.[64] In contrast, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler was much interested in the occult.[58]

Regarding the persecution of Jews, the contemporary, historical perspective is that in the period between the Protestant Reformation and the Holocaust, [[Martin Luther's treatise On the Jews and their Lies (1543), exercised a major and persistent intellectual influence upon the German practice of anti-Semitism against Jewish citizens. The Nazis publicly displayed an original of On the Jews and their Lies during the annual Nuremberg rallies, and the city also presented a first edition of it to Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer, which described Luther’s treatise as the most radically anti-Semitic tract ever published.[65][66]

Protestant Bishop Martin Sasse published a compendium of Martin Luther’s writings shortly after Kristallnacht; in the introduction, he approved of the burning of synagogues and mentioned the coincidental date: “On November 10, 1938, on Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany.” He urged Germans to heed the words “of the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews.”[67] Theologian Johannes Wallmann, however, said Luther’s anti-Semitic tract exercised no continual influence in Germany, that it was mostly ignored during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[68] Nonetheless, Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch said that On the Jews and Their Lies was the blueprint for Kristallnacht.[69]

Economics

Regarding international finance, Nazism postulated an international bankingJewish conspiracy headed by a cabal of financiers responsible for the Great Depression. The Nazis claimed that controllers of the cabal, who had manœuvred themselves into economically controlling the United States and Europe, were a powerful Jewish élite. The Nazis believed that the cabal was integral to a greater, long-term Jewish conspiracy, wherein Jews would establish global domination via the New World Order. The banks that the cabal allegedly controlled exerted political influence upon nation-states by granting or withholding credit.

Deutsches Volk–Deutsche Arbeit: German People, German Work, the alliance of worker and work. (1934)

Nazi economic practice first concerned the immediate domestic economy of Germany, then international trade. To eliminate Germany’s poverty, domestic policy was narrowly concerned with four major goals: (i) elimination of unemployment, (ii) rapid and substantial re-armament, (iii) fiscal protection against resurgent hyper-inflation, and (iv) expansion of consumer-goods production, to raise middle- and lower- class living standards. The intent was correcting the Nazi-perceived short-comings of the Weimar Republic, and to solidify domestic support for the Nazi Party; between 1933 and 1936, the German (Gross National Product) annually increased 9.5 per cent, and the industrial rate increased 17.2 per cent.

The expansion propelled the German economy from depression to full employment in less than four years. Public consumption increased 18.7 per cent, and private consumption increased 3.6 per cent annually. Historian Richard Evans reports that before the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the German economy "had recovered from the Depression faster than its counterparts in other countries. Germany’s foreign debt had been stabilized, interest rates had fallen to half their 1932 level, the stock exchange had recovered from the Depression, the gross national product had risen by 81 per cent over the same period . . . Inflation and unemployment had been conquered."[70]

Private property

Private property rights were conditional upon the economic mode of use; if it did not advance Nazi economic goals, the state could nationalize it .[71] Nazi government corporate takeovers, and threatened takeovers, encouraged compliance with government production plans, even if unprofitable for the firm. For example, the owner of the Junkers aeroplane factory refused the government’s directives, whereupon the Nazis occupied the factory and arrested Hugo Junkers, but paid him for his nationalized business. Although the Nazis privatised public properties and public services, they also increased economic state control.[72] Under Nazi economics, free competition and self-regulating markets diminished; nevertheless, Adolf Hitler’s social Darwinist beliefs made him reluctant to entirely disregard business competition and private property as economic engines.[73][74] In 1942, Hitler privately said: “I absolutely insist on protecting private property ... we must encourage private initiative”.[75]

To the proposition that businesses were private property in name but not in substance, but, in Ther Journal of Economic History article “The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry”, Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner counter that despite state control, business had much production and investment planning freedom — yet acknowledge that Nazi German economy was state-directed.[76]

Centralization

Agricultural and industrial central planning was a prominent feature of Nazi economics. To tie farmers to the land, selling agricultural land was prohibited; farm ownership was nominally private, but discretion over operations and residual income were proscribed. That was achieved by granting business monopoly rights to marketing boards, to control production and prices with a quota system. Quotas also were established for industrial goods, such as pig iron, steel, aluminium, magnesium, gunpowder, explosives, synthetic rubber, fuels, and electricity. A compulsory cartel law was enacted in 1936, allowing the minister of economics to make existing cartels compulsory and permanent, and compel industries to form cartels, where none existed, although disestablished by decree, by 1943, they were replaced with more authoritarian economic agencies.[77]

Finance

In place of ordinary profit-incentive determining the economy, financial investment was regulated per the needs of the state. The profit incentive for businessmen remained, but was greatly modified: “Fixing of profits, not their suppression, was the official policy of the Nazi party”; however, Nazi agencies replaced the profit-motive that automatically allocated investment, and the course of the economy.[78] Nazi government financing eventually dominated private financial investment, which the proportion of private securities issued falling from over half of the total in 1933–34 to approximately 10 per cent in 1935–38. Heavy business-profit taxes limited self-financing of firms. The largest firms were mostly exempt from taxes on profits, however, government control of these were extensive enough to leave “only the shell of private ownership”. Taxes and financial subsidies also directed the economy; the underlying economic policy — terror — was incentive to agree and comply. Nazi language indicated death or concentration camp for any business owner who pursued his own self-interest, instead of the ends of the State.[71]

Ideologic competition

The German Revolution of 1918–19:Freikorps soldiers and Communist revolutionary prisoner, Bavaria.

Nazism successfully competed for voters against communism because Nazism appealed to the anti-Bolshevik German establishment — by promising socio-economic stability — and to the working class — by promising jobs. The Nazis particularly appealed to the lumpenproletariat, whom leftists had dismissed as politically inconsequential. Nazi pro-labour rhetoric appealed to workers disaffected with capitalism, by promoting profit limitations, rent abolition, and increased social benefits (for German gentiles, only), whilst simultaneously proposing a politico-economic model that divested Marxist socialism of ideologic tenets dangerous to capitalism, i.e. class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, and worker-controlled means of production. Sociologist Michael Mann defined fascism as a “transcendent and cleansing nation statism through paramilitarism”, with the word transcendent denoting the abolishment of social classes, in order for the birth of a new, organic, and pure people: all classes are abolished by transition, all “others” (approximately two-thirds of the German populace).[79][80]

The simplistic Nazi electoral rhetoric, effected with simple campaigns, and a reactionary ideology incorporating pan-Germanism, deceived the Nazi Party’s conservative German establishment allies into underestimating the Nazis’ political strength, ability to govern and continued existence as a political party. The populism, anti-Communism, and anti-capitalism of Nazism gave it a popular strength greater than that of traditional conservative parties, such as the DNVP (German National People’s Party).

Anti-communist support

After Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista) assumed Italian government in 1922, Italian Fascism became a respectable, politically realistic opposition to Marxist Communism — especially after the Fascist Blackshirt suppression of Communist and anarchist parties and movements, who had destabilized post–Great War Italy with strikes and factory occupations.

In the Tree of Hate (1985), Phillip Wayne Powell reports that “in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a powerful surge of German patriotism was stimulated by the disdain of Italians for German cultural inferiority and barbarism, which lead to a counter-attempt, by German humanists, to laud German qualities.”[82] M.W. Fodor claimed in The Nation in 1936, “No race has suffered so much from an inferiority complex as has the German. National Socialism was a kind of Coué method of converting the inferiority complex, at least temporarily, into a feeling of superiority”.[83]

During the 1920s and 1930s, Nazism was ideologically heterogeneous, comprising two sub-ideologies, those of Otto Strasser and of Adolf Hitler. As leftists, the Strasserites fell afoul of Hitler, who expelled Otto Strasser from the Nazi Party when he failed to establish the Black Front, an oppositional, anti-capitalist bloc, in 1930. The Strasserites remaining in the Party, mostly of the Sturmabteilung (SA), were assassinated in the Night of the Long Knives purge, including Gregor Strasser, Otto’s brother.

The post-war crises of Weimar Germany (1919–33) consolidated Nazism as an ideology: military defeat in the First World War (1914–18), capitulation with the Treaty of Versailles, economic depression, and the consequent societal instability. In exploiting, and excusing, the military defeat, Nazism proffered the political Dolchstosslegende (“Legend of the Dagger-stab in the Back”) [84] claiming that the Imperial German war effort was internally sabotaged, by Jews, socialists, and Bolsheviks. Proposing that, because the Reichwehr’s defeat did not occur in Germany, the sabotage included a lack of patriotism among their political antagonists, specifically the Social Democrats and the Ebert Government, whom the Nazis accused of treason.

Origin

On 5 January 1919, the locksmith Anton Drexler, and five other men, founded the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP — German Workers' Party), the predecessor of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP — National Socialist German Workers’ Party).[88][87] In July 1919, the Reichswehr intelligence department despatched Corporal Adolf Hitler, as a Verbindungsmann (police spy) to infiltrate and subvert the DAP. His oratory so impressed the DAP members, they asked him join the party, and, in September 1919, the police spy Hitler became the party's propagandist.[87][89] On 24 February 1920, the DAP was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, against Hitler’s preferred “Social Revolutionary Party” name.[87][90][91] Later, in consolidating his control of the NSDAP, Hitler ousted Drexler from the party and assumed leadership on 29 July 1921.[87][91]

Ascension

The votes that the Nazis received in the 1932 elections established the Nazi Party as the largest parliamentary faction of the Weimar Republic government. Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, and his subsequent consolidation of offices and their consequent dictatorial powers established the Third Reich (Dritte Reich), denoting Nazi Germany as the historical successor to the First Reich of the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806), and to the Second Reich of the German Empire (1871–1918). Under Nazism, Germany bore two official names, the Deutsches Reich (German Reich) and Großdeutsches Reich (Greater German Reich). In 1934, its first year in power, the Nazi Party announced that the Dritte Reich was to be a Tausendjähriges Reich (Thousand Year Empire); but lasted only twelve years.

Consolidation

The Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933, was Adolf Hitler’s raison d’état for suppressing his political opponents. The following day, 28 February, he persuaded Weimar Republic President Paul von Hindenburg to grant him, as German Chancellor, an emergency-powers decree suspending civil liberties and the governments of the German federal states. On 23 March, with an Enabling Act (four-year Presidential decree-law power circumventing the Reichstag), the Reichstag conferred dictatorial powers to Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who subsequently personally managed the political emergencies of the German State, by decree. Moreover, then possessing virtually absolute power, the Nazis established totalitarian control; they abolished labour unions and political parties; and imprisoned their political opponents, first at wilde Lager, improvised camps, then in concentration camps. Nazism had been established, yet the Reichswehr remained impartial, Nazi power over Germany remained virtual, not absolute.

Having eliminated the political enemies of his Government and his party, Hitler then purged his rivals from the Nazi Party, especially the allies of Ernst Röhm, leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA), and of Gregor Strasser, leader of the Nazi left wing. In 1934, to ensure the Nazi Government of the Reichswehr’s support, for a coup d’État, they were assassinated during the Night of the Long Knives (30 June–2 July) purges; later, upon the death of President Von Hindenburg, on 2 August 1934, as President and Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler possessed virtually absolute power; yet the Reichswehr was not yet formally obeisant.

In culturally consolidating Nazism as the German way of life, the Hitler Government effected the national Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses (1 April 1933), three months upon assuming power; earlier, the Hindenburg Government had haphazardly practiced official anti-Semitism, but the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935 established legal, systematic persecution of the Jews. For international public consumption, visible anti-Semitism was minimised during the 1936 Summer Olympics, but fully reinstated afterwards.

Foreign responses

Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler, at the Bad Gödesberg meeting, 23 September 1938.

From the mid-1930s, the British and French governments generally appeased the Nazi régime and its rearmament breaching of the Treaty of Versailles. Despite Anglo-French criticism of Nazi treaty breaches, Germany established totalitarian and anti-Semitic public policies. Especially in Britain, the appeasement of Nazism was partly based upon the erroneous presumption that Adolf Hitler would not precipitate a second world war; despite already having served notice in Mein Kampf, wherein he explicitly commits to such a revanchist war.

Later, when Nazi militarism could not be ignored, the militarily-unprepared British and French continued their appeasement of Nazism. Winston Churchill noted that appeasement worsened the Nazi German threat:

You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war. If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds are against you, and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.

World War II

As revanchists, the Nazis were determined to retrieve the territories Germany ceded per the Treaty of Versailles, to establish Großdeutschland (Greater Germany), which would comprise the Free City of Danzig, to which Poland had limited rights per the treaty. When diplomacy failed to secure Danzig, the Nazis and the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (23 August 1939) for aiding Nazi Germany in a war with Poland. In 1939, France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in response its (westwards) attack on Poland; simultaneously, the USSR attacked Poland from the east; Poland was disestablished, and the war among Germany, France, and the UK continued.

In 1940, Germany attacked and defeated the French and British continental forces in France, then occupied the country. The Battle of Britain (July–October 1940) followed and stalled, so Germany then attacked east, believing that when the USSR was vanquished, the UK would sue for peace with Nazi Germany. In 1941, Germany and its Axis allies attacked the USSR with Operation Barbarossa (22 June–5 December 1941). Despite initial successes, the Red Army repelled them. After the Battle of Stalingrad (17 July 1942–2 February 1943), the USSR counter-attacked, repelled the Axis invaders from Russia, then progressed west to Nazi Germany. On 6 June 1944, the Anglo–American Normandy Invasion landed Allied armies in France, heading east en route to meeting the Red Army in vanquishing the Third Reich at the Battle of Berlin (16 April–2 May 1945).

^ The German name of the Nazi Party ("National-Socialist German Workers’ Party") is the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, pronounced German pronunciation: [natsjoˈnaːlzotsiaːˌlistiʃə ˈdɔytʃə ˈarbaitɐparˌtai] (Arbeiter "worker").

^ The term Sozi (/zoːtsi/) is short for the German word Sozialdemokrat (pronounced /zo'tsjaːldemoˌkraːt/), meaning social democrat.

^Hitler, Adolf (1961). Hitler's Secret Book. New York: Grove Press. pp. 8–9, 17–18. ISBN 0394620038. OCLC9830111. "Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject."

^Bergen, Doris L.War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust p. 105. Published by Rowman & Littlefield, 2003 <googlebooks.com>

^ "The Trial of German Major War Criminals, Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany" (January 8, 1946) The Nizkor Project <http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-04/tgmwc-04-29-02.shtml>: For example, "Entire 'Kreise' (districts) remained thus completely deprived of clergy. In the city of Poznan itself the spiritual care of some 200,000 Catholics remained in the hands of not more than four priests."

^Holy War "TIME" May 31, 1937 <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,847866,00.html>>: '[Hitler] had long been lining up "evidence" to prove that German Catholic monasteries were hotbeds of immorality. In a climactic, triumphant effort to squelch Catholicism on Aryan soil he threw all the immorality trials into the courts at the same time. He hoped that wholesale convictions would destroy the prestige of the Catholic Church for good, that the Reich's 2,000,000 or so Catholic children would be transformed without a hitch into little Brown Shirts.'

^Trial of German Major War Criminals (Volume 3) Dec. 17, 1945. The Nizkor Project <http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-03/tgmwc-03-21-16.html>"The struggle against the Church did, in fact, become ever more bitter, there was the dissolution of Catholic organisations; ...the systematic defamation, by means of a clever, closely organised propaganda, of the Church, the clergy . . . in the summer of 1942, 480 German-speaking ministers of religion were known to be gathered there; of these, 45 were Protestants, all the others Catholic priests. In spite of the continuous inflow of new internees, especially from dioceses of Bavaria, Rhenania and Westphalia, their number, as a result of the high rate of mortality, at the beginning of this year did not surpass 350. Nor should we pass over in silence those belonging to occupied territories, Holland, Belgium, France (among whom the Bishop of Clermont), Luxembourg, Slovenia, Italy. Many of those priests and laymen endured indescribable sufferings for their faith and for their vocation".

^The Trial of German Major War Criminals (Volume 1) Nov. 21, 1945 The Nizkor Project <http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-01/tgmwc-01-02-04.html> >: "A most intense drive was directed against the Roman Catholic Church. After a strategic Concordat with the Holy See, signed in July, 1933, in Rome, which never was observed by the Nazi Party, a long and persistent persecution of the Catholic Church, its priesthood and its members, was carried out...Priests and bishops were laid upon, riots were stimulated to harass them, and many were sent to concentration camps."

^ Nizkor Nazi Conspiracy & Aggression Volume II, Criminality of Groups and Organizations, The Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) & Sicherheitsdienst The Nizkor Project <http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/nca/nca-02/nca-02-15-criminality-06-07.html>: '(2) The GESTAPO and the SD were primary agencies for the persecution of the churches. The fight against the churches was never brought out into the open by the GESTAPO and the SD as in the case of the persecution of the Jews. The struggle was designed to weaken the churches and to lay a foundation for the ultimate destruction of the confessional churches after the end of the war. (1815-PS) [. . . .] The notes on the speeches delivered at this conference indicate that the GESTAPO considered the church as an enemy to be attacked with determination and "true fanaticism."...'

Wallmann, Johannes. “The Reception of Luther’s Writings on the Jews from the Reformation to the End of the 19th Century”, Lutheran Quarterly, n.s. 1 (Spring 1987) 1:72–97. Wallmann writes: “The assertion that Luther’s expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment have been of major and persistent influence in the centuries after the Reformation, and that there exists a continuity between Protestant anti-Judaism and modern racially oriented anti-Semitism, is at present wide-spread in the literature; since the Second World War it has understandably become the prevailing opinion.”

Hillerbrand, Hans J. “Martin Luther,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007. Hillerbrand writes: “[H]is strident pronouncements against the Jews, especially toward the end of his life, have raised the question of whether Luther significantly encouraged the development of German anti-Semitism. Although many scholars have taken this view, this perspective puts far too much emphasis on Luther and not enough on the larger peculiarities of German history.”

Translations

Noun

One who subscribes to or advocates Nazism or a similarly fascist, racist, or
anti-Semitic ideology.

(slang,
usually pejorative, see usage notes
below) One who imposes one’s views
on others.

She’s a total grammar Nazi.

Usage
notes

(one who imposes
one’s views on others): As the actual Nazis
practiced genocide and murdered millions of people in cold blood,
this flippant use is sometimes considered to be offensive and in
very poor taste. It is sometimes used to offend out of anger or
intentionally.